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Envision AI

Category:

Description of App:

Envision is an app that lets visually impaired people go about their everyday life in an independent and meaningful way. Envision provides information based on what you see, for example, when you look at a watch, it tells you the time, etc.

Use envision by tapping at the center of the screen and it would describe the scene for you.

You can also train faces and objects for the envision for recognize. envision does not collect or store any personal or personally identifiable information.

Apple Watch Support:

Version:

Free or Paid:

Device(s) App Was Tested On:

iOS Version:

Accessibility Comments:

VoiceOver Performance:

VoiceOver reads all page elements.

Button Labeling:

All buttons are clearly labeled.

Usability:

The app is fully accessible with VoiceOver and is easy to navigate and use.

Other Comments:

This is a great alternative to the Seeing AI: Talking Camera for the Blind and Aipoly Vision: Sight for Blind & Visually Impaired. Envision AI is available in many countries where the
Seeing AI: Talking Camera for the Blind is not. The biggest feature that Envision AI must feature is the ability to teach Envision AI to recognize objects and faces. Very similar to the LookTel Recognizer. This feature is not in the
Seeing AI: Talking Camera for the Blind or any other similar object recognition apps making this one of my most favorite feature in the Envision AI.

The developers have been great in listening to all the feedback and how the app could be improved. Each update is making this more and more mature and great to use.

The only comment that I want the users to understand and know about is that Envision AI is now currently free. At some point it may become a paid subscription. What would be included as being free and on the monthly subscription have yet to be seen. That will be be seen and heard from the developer when the beta cycle has ended.

The developer is currently taking all feedback so that they can make this as robust as it can be so that it will be worth to have a monthly subscription. I would prefer a straight up price of rlife, but I also understand that the developer must make money and recoup the development cost and all future upgrades.

14 Comments

I hope it will not be a paid subscription because I cannot use gift cards for that. It would be better with credits because then more people would be able to get the app so I really hope there will be no paid subscription. I have no problem with buying credits but I cannot subscribe with a gift card and I cannot connect my iPad to a credit card.

We're working on the exact pricing model for the app as we speak. A paid subscription would allow us to continuously improve the software week on week and also wouldn't restrict our users usage of the product. But we'll definitely experiment with options and see how best to serve the community going forward.

We'll keep you posted about any changes. In meantime, please do continue giving us any feedback you might have about the product, we'll be more than happy to help.

I just heard on the Blind Bargains podcast that Envision AI may be going to a paid subscription model. If that happens, I'll simply uninstall it. I mean why should I pay for Envision AI when I have Seeing AI, TapTapSee, Be My Eyes, Be Specular, and KNFB Reader? All of which except for KNFB Reader are free, and even KNFB Reader is free to use after you purchase it.

We truly understand your thoughts on this. However, like any other service, there are significant costs on our end that we need to meet in order to keep providing great service. We are constantly exploring other revenue models and talking to third-parties like insurance agencies, municipal corporations and advertisers to reduce the burden of expense on our users. Being a small team, we cannot afford to offer our services at a loss which giants like Microsoft initially can. Hence, a subscription-based model makes the most sense for us at the moment, however, we are open to more feedback and suggestions on that front.

Envision aims to be different from other services in the market by being way more engaged with our users and way more agile in our development. We are focused on understanding the needs of the users all the time and constantly building solutions for that delivered through frequent updates. That is our vision that is what you support when you support us.

That said, we would completely understand if you do not wish to support us at our current state. We will continue to strive for building our service to the point where you truly find it valuable.

I for one would have no problem with taking out a subscription for this app. For one thing this app was made available worldwide we in the UK did not have to wait for it to be available to us months later. The developers have clearly demonstrated their willingness to listen to us the users and work with and for us to perfect the app. Remember to that TapTap See has not always been free. I would encourage people to support this app as it feel it has a lot of potential. Competition is a good thing and if we do not support smaller developments then we will just be left with one or more players who do not always listen to us and when they have a monopoly who knows for how long their apps will remain free. Keep up the good work I say, you have my support at least.

I would like to report some problems. I cannot find the way to delete previously trained objects or faces. In the library I can only find trained faces but even those I cannot delete. Could you please provide me with some help? Thanks.

If this will be a subscription, I think I will go for Seeing AI because I don’t have the possibility to use a credit card to my apple id because my guardian doesn’t want this. So I cannot subscribe to things like this. That is why credits would be better than subscription. It doesn’t make sence that everyone will be able to use it because there are lots of people in the same situation as me and cannot use subscriptions. I understand that the developers need to fund the app but subscription is NOT the answer at all. I’m sorry, but I will stick to seeing ai.

Hope all of you are doing fine? This is Karthik, the developer of Envision. We know we haven't been posting on AppleVis for a while. This is mostly because we had moved our discussions to smaller groups of beta testers where we could engage more deeply to understand what and how to build features within our service. Since then, we have been posting a new update to our app every single week consistently with features and improvements that have improved the quality of our service. Although we have been posting about our updates on Twitter and Facebook constantly, we thought it would be great to return to AppleVis to talk about all the new things we have been able to build since our early interactions. There is a lot, but I will limit myself to highlighting only a few major ones here:

1. We have a new interface now which has been designed to be more intuitive and easy to use. There are three tabs to start off with: Text Recognition, General Recognition and Settings. All the functions that you need can be found in these three tabs easily.

2. The Text Recognition Tab now has three distinct options that allow you to "Read text instantly", "Read Handwriting" and "Read Documents". Our instant text reading option is now very enhanced and can read texts from any kind of surface, in all languages, both quickly and accurately.

3. The handwriting text is still experimental and currently only reads English (and other Latin-based languages). It works surprisingly well on post-it notes and greeting cards.

4. With our new document text option, users now have built-in guidance to position their phones. Also, by long pressing on this button, users have the option to take pictures of multiple pages at once and have them read out. There are also options to export and share this text. Our document text recognition is measurably the best OCR currently available.

5. The text recognition tab also has a digital magnifier that allows low-vision users to zoom in on texts to magnify them. There is also an option to invert colours to achieve higher contrast.

6. The General Recognition Tab currently has only two buttons, to "Describe Scene" and "Teach Envision". The "Describe Scene" however has many recognition elements built into it. For example, it does both face and object recognition within it for the faces and object that you have taught Envision. So it would not just recognize a face of a person, but also tell you what they are doing. It also recognizes objects that you have trained, like your personal keychain or coffee mug.

7. Lastly, it can also give you contextual information, that is, if you take picture of a watch it tells the current time and taking pictures of the window, tells the current weather.

9. The flow and experience of teaching a new object have also been improved with a new library management system in place.

10. Apart from these, we are planning to add several new options to the General Recognition Tab. So far, our focus was on improving the quality and experience of the Text Recognition tab. Now that we have fairly achieved that, we are focusing on adding to the General Recognition, which you will be able to try really soon.

11. There are several improvement and performance improvements that you will see sprinkled throughout the service when you use it. We have also gone more global by adding translations for 8 more languages and many more to come.

12. Lastly, the app also had to move to a subscription model to support the development, processing and maintenance of this service. We believe we have made the options as friendly and affordable as possible. We do provide a 14-day of completely free and no-strings-attached trial period during which you can try all the features of Envision and decide for yourself if it's worth the subscription. There is also a one-time cost for those who prefer that.

That covers most of it. I would really appreciate it if you could give it a shot and let me know your thoughts on it. We are very excited for all the new features that we are currently developing and we ensure that we share our updates with AppleVis from now on. Looking forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,
Karthik

P.S. If any of you have already expired your 14-day free trial, please message here or mail me at karthik@letsenvision.com and we will extend your trial period by another 14-days.

A year ago I said that I would pass on Envision AI's subscription because Seeing AI, which is free was pretty much the same thing and both apps seemed to be evenly matched as far as performance, functionality, and results. But when I heard about the 30% discount being offered this month and my growing dissatisfaction with some of the features in Seeing AI, I decided to give Envision a try. I still chose to skip the subscription, but this time I did it by buying the lifetime plan.

Seeing AI is still a great app, but with some of it's features starting to not work as well as they used to, it was time to find other solutions.

I still prefer Seeing AI's user interface over the one in Envision AI, and some of Envision AI's features don't even come close to what Seeing AI provides.

For example, for short text, Envision AI blows Seeing AI away, it's not even a fair fight. The most I could ever get out of Seeing AI was one word, moving the camera further away didn't get it to read more words, nor did slowly moving it to try to scan other words. So Seeing AI's implementation was basically useless.

On the other hand, when I went to scan the barcode for a package of frozen vegetables, that's all Envision AI would tell me about it, if I wanted to know what variety of vegetable was in the package, I'd have to do a search in Safari. If you ask me, a bar code scanner that tells you what you already knows is pretty much useless. When I scan the exact same package with Seeing AI, I am told that it is broccoli, carrots, and colliflower in a sauce, now that is what I wanted to know.

So, despite one being free and one being paid, there is no clear winner between the two apps.